Check if your WP7 app is a Bing Instant Answer

After reading through all of the Windows Phone 7 “Mango” documentation, this is one tip that stuck out as a simple but nice feature that I haven’t seen mentioned much.

Search on Windows Phone 7 “Mango” has been upgraded to include the concept of an App Instant Answer.

For example, you search for “xbox” and right inline with the results, in the prime top spot, is a link to Bing’s top WP7 app result for that search term.

From there you can tap the thumbnail to download or launch the app.

This new feature and the addition of quick cards is a nice example of how the WP7 team is focusing on improving the flow of using a mobile device. +1 for the deep integration between Bing and Windows Phone.

Now the nice thing is that when the app is launched, a parameter is passed via query string so that you can discover and track when your app has been opened using App Instant Answer.

You can easily grab the search term by using this code:

JavaScript

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if(this.NavigationContext.QueryString.ContainsKey("bing_query"))

{

stringsearchTerm=this.NavigationContext.QueryString["bing_query"];

//do something awesome with searchTerm

}

And you can debug your app in Visual Studio by updating the task in the WPAppManifest.xml file: